


Conversations

by ballantine



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Angst, Episode Codas, F/M, Ficlet Collection, M/M, Season/Series 03, Season/Series 04, probably
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-20
Updated: 2017-04-20
Packaged: 2018-10-21 03:36:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10676889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ballantine/pseuds/ballantine
Summary: A series of ficlets in which people, mostly Silver and Flint, talk to each other.





	1. soldier by chance

**Author's Note:**

> This a collection of ficlets I posted over time on tumblr, and I am re-posting them here for safekeeping. All but the first are set in season 4.

The truth comes to him all at once out of the darkness of a moonless sea night two weeks back on the account.

“You never cared about the gold in the first place, did you?”

He watches Flint blink at the bookshelf in the cabin for a moment and then turn to him, face quirked in inquiry. His reflexes are a little slow, expression blurred by the rum Silver had produced earlier in the evening with an accompanying smile that said come, we deserve this.

“Has the guilt hit you at last?”

“No,” Silver says honestly, and breathes through a smile when Flint laughs in response. Once such a laugh might have terrified him, and the fact that it now only elicits a feeling of warmth within his chest is the source of no small amount of wonder. Of all the transformations he has undergone, this may be the most unexpected.

Flint makes his way back to his chair behind the desk, gait rolling and smooth because neither rum nor tempest can undo the balance of a man who has been at sea since the age of thirteen. Even before he lost his leg Silver hadn’t that ease. And he now works twice as hard to appear half as nimble on the quarterdeck.

Flint interrupts his thoughts. “So what is it then?”

Silver tilts his head, not following.

“You ask about the gold. If you’re looking for reassurance, I have none to offer you.” Flint raises his tin mug in a toast. ”You’re still a little shit for stealing it.”

“Yes, I’m really feeling your wrath here.” He studies Flint another moment. “But returning to my point, I think I’m right. You never cared about the gold. Only what you could do with it.”

Flint tapped a finger against the rim of the mug. “Rather the point of gold, isn’t it? Doesn’t every man care chiefly about what purpose he may turn it to?”

“Of course – drink and food and whores,” Silver says. He then gestures to himself. “Freedom from want. But you were never after any of that.”

Flint’s eyes wrest back some of the sharpness the rum has stolen and they flick over Silver in a motion almost too quick to catch. “And what do you think I was after?”

“What you have. A war.” The realization is a slow cresting wave. Flint has sunk ships, leveled a colonial city, killed countless people. In the process he has lost a fortune, his oldest companions, and even Nassau itself. But he still got his war with England. “That’s why you do not hold the theft of the Urca gold against me,” he says, marveling. “Because it was never about the gold.”

He doesn’t know why he couldn’t see it before. Flint isn’t a pirate. He’s military, through and through.

Flint’s response drifts over to him, “While you sit there, imagining that you’ve completed your understanding of me, you may wish to turn that mind inward and pose a question to yourself.”

Silver smiles faintly. “And what question is that?”

Flint pours more rum into Silver’s cup and nudges it forward. He waits for Silver to raise it to his lips before saying quietly, “We both walked away from that gold. You perceive my reasons, but what of your own?”

A nervous feeling creeps into Silver’s limbs. He finds that he is holding himself tensely in his chair for reasons he doesn’t quite understand.

“I told you before,” he says. “The crew – ”

Flint continues as if he hasn’t spoken, and there is no hint of the drink in the way he now pins Silver with an uncompromising stare. “A man with a share of that prize could afford himself the finest medical care available. Could purchase for himself a false leg close enough to fool anybody not looking for it. He could live in such a comfortable state, it would not matter that he was an invalid. And yet you let the gold go with nary a glance backward. Strapped on that metal boot Dr. Howell fashioned and recommitted yourself to a life at sea aboard an active hunting ship. I got my war, but you’re choosing to fight in it.”

Silver’s mouth is dry, his throat tight. He doesn’t know how he could have fooled himself into thinking it could ever be easy, sitting around a couple of drinks with Flint. They may now be – friends, or something close to, but that does not mean the man has magically changed into something softer or less impenetrable. He’s not used to making such an obvious misstep.

“You’re wrong about one thing,” he says, a slight rasp to his voice the only allowance of his mental state.

Flint raises his eyebrows. “Do tell.”

“It would never not matter that the man was an invalid. Never.” He watches Flint’s expression change but cannot divine its meaning. “He could hide it from the whole world, but to what end? He would still know. He could never forget it.”

He finishes his cup and sets it down lightly before standing. Highly conscious of Flint watching, he takes particular care not to let the now-familiar ache of weight resettling on the stump to show on his face or affect even the slightest hesitation in his movement.

“You haven’t answered the question,” Flint says before he reaches the door. His tone is unreadable.

Silver doesn’t turn around. “Didn’t I just?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original tumblr post [here](https://bal-lantine.tumblr.com/post/144437240320/soldier-by-chance)


	2. legacy and comfort

Deep within the maroon camp, Flint sits at a war council table, running a thoughtful finger over the edges of Billy’s latest letter and pondering the convoluted meaning of legacy.

Meanwhile, his quartermaster paces restlessly on the other side of the tent, his heavy, uneven tread betraying irritation even while his face remains neutral.

The coming battle will define them all, and only some of that story will be within their control to write. If one day they look back and say Captain Flint won Nassau and ushered in the reign of its new pirate king, will he have failed his original goal or merely ensured that it will last? There comes a day where every leader has to consider the relay of his power or risk destroying all that he has built.

“Well?” Silver says finally, coming to halt at the end of the table and looking down at him with ill-concealed impatience. “Aren’t you going to say anything? What are you thinking right now?”

“I am wondering whether the ‘Long’ prefix was intended as an attempt at humor on Billy’s part,” Flint says.

“Be serious.”

“You’re right. He isn’t really the joking sort.”

“James.” Silver grips the back of a chair and leans forward over the table, eyes dark and demanding a real answer.

What is he supposed to say? Flint isn’t worried.

He doesn’t know how to tell Silver that he is incapable of feeling much rancor about the pirate king tale because John himself is clearly already feeling it for him. That from the moment their eyes met over the table after receiving Billy’s missive, Flint saw the surprise and dismay surging up within him, and it was like a cool wave dousing the barely-sparked flames of his own outrage.

Yet his silence seems to eat at Silver’s calm.

“You must know,” Silver says carefully, “this is the first I’ve heard of any of this. I had no part in it.”

“There was never any suspicion in my mind that you did,” Flint assures him, voice mild. He tilts his head and studies Silver, takes in the way his fingers loosen a little over the chair back.

“What bothers you about it,” Flint asks before he can stop himself. “That Billy speaks under a banner of your name or that I may feel some sense of injury over it?”

Flint has been having – thoughts, lately. Idle daydreams of a future wherein the business of war is no longer taking up every waking moment of his life. He thinks of reading in Miranda’s cottage, or sharing a drink with Silver in the waning light of an evening. Afterwards pulling him along the dark hallway to the bedroom. The scenes in his mind are almost terrifying in their domesticity.

What was it Vane had said to him about the dangers of yearning for comfort?

Silver says slowly, “You know as well as I that this whole enterprise works best when we are standing on the same level. When the two of us speak with one voice. I would not have our rogue first mate jeopardize that, no.”

Flint wants to tell him that it doesn’t matter what stories Billy spreads back on New Providence, because he knows John is with him. That it’s been so long since he’s had that type of unwavering support, he doesn’t know what to do with it some days.

“Billy can peddle whatever propaganda he sees fit to,” he says. “When the time comes, I know you and I will stand together. Your word to that end is all I require.”

After a protracted moment of silence, the remaining tension in Silver’s face drains away, and he finally quirks his mouth in a smile.

“You know what _I_ think the 'Long’ was referring to,” he begins, drawing his chair back from the table so he may sit across from Flint. A wicked gleam takes up residence in his eyes.

Comfort will have to wait until after they’ve won back Nassau. Until then, Flint will make do with having a partner in battle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original tumblr post [here](https://bal-lantine.tumblr.com/post/156605313285/legacy-and-comfort)


	3. to the deathless gods who rule the vaulting skies (go fuck yourselves)

When Odysseus was at long last reunited with Penelope, it is said that Athena stood between the night in the west and dawn in the east, holding back both to give him more time with his beloved wife, for come morning his final trial awaited him.

Flint has no Penelope, and he has long since given up on the hope that any god would bestow favor upon him. So he does not know why he finds himself in what was once Eleanor Guthrie’s office, sipping rum and contemplating the coming morning with something not wholly unlike dread. He could be sleeping. He _should_ be sleeping.

He’d briefly considered and discarded the threat posed by Billy and his men, stationed just across the street. If he is to be killed, it won’t be by way of a knife in his sleep. There is no story to be told there, and Billy won’t want to waste the political capital of his death if he doesn’t have to, no matter how much he wants it for his own satisfaction.

In that regard, he has far more control than Flint ever did. Good for him.

Flint takes another drink.

The moon has just barely began to wax, and so the night is almost as impenetrably dark here in Nassau as it had been in the countryside. Flickering torches dot the street below, and if he tries very hard, he can make out the bodies of the fallen. In the evening they had set men collecting them, prioritizing the bodies of pirates and ex-slaves. The result is that when they all wake up in the morning, the streets will still be covered with maroon-clad corpses. They will have to take care of them soon if they want to avoid filling the city with the stench of spoilage.

He thinks they could arrange them on the beach. The color of their coats will be vivid enough to catch the eye, even from a great distance in the bay. Perhaps they could spell out a message for Rogers, should he be the one to return: a simple _fuck off!_ would suffice. Berringer could be the dot in the exclamation point.

“May I inquire as to when you last slept?” John asks from somewhere behind him.

Flint doesn’t turn, convinced it would appear too similar to startlement. He thought the other man had retired hours ago.

“Do I carry myself like a man lacking in energy?” he says in return.

“Your carriage is not what I use for diagnosis, unreliable as I have found it in the past.” He must be just inside the door. How did he open it without Flint hearing? “With you, I prefer reports from the men and an instinctive knowledge of your habits. Both tell me that you haven’t been bothering with sleep.”

Flint thinks on the past few nights: the bloodletting at the Underhill plantation and desperate stumbling retreat over pitch black fields, the hours he spent sitting outside Miranda’s cottage, will and gorge finally rebelling at the sight of its defiled transformation.

“ _Bothering_ implies a choice,” he says shortly. “And anyway – am I to believe you have done otherwise?”

“Yes, actually,” John says. “Not much to do when you’re being held captive in a beach shanty. Hands is not much of a conversationalist.”

Flint can tell by the tone of his voice that there is now a smile in his eyes. He can picture the creasing at the corners. The fixed warmth that so frequently bypasses a room full of other people in order to fall upon him alone. All he would have to do to see it is turn around.

He stubbornly remains pointed toward the window.

John sighs, much too put upon for a man with a warm bed and probably athletic sex in his near future.

“Perhaps if you share whatever it is that is occupying you, we can _both_ get some sleep. There is a lot to be done tomorrow.”

“I don’t need reminding of what we must do tomorrow,” Flint says, a little sharply. “But you are correct, we will need our rest. There is no need to concern yourself with how I get it, however.” There, he said it, and with barely a pause to allow in the longing.

Thump of the new crutch, which John seems already on a quick path to mastering. When he speaks again, he’s much closer – over by the desk. The rum.

“Right, why should I be concerned?” Tone a little less warm, amusement turned like the flat of a knife to its edge. “At a juncture of great consequence to our changing fortunes, I find my captain sleeplessly brooding in the dark by himself. Sounds oddly familiar, but I’m sure it’s just _deja vu_.”

“Would you – _leave_ it.” Flint finally turns and looks at him. Tactical mistake. John is regarding him with open frustration, which transforms to startlement barely a second after getting a proper look at him in the desk’s flickering lantern light.

“I really don’t appreciate being cast into a mothering position, but for the sake of the men,” and here Flint, barely listening, thinks _oh, the men_ with something akin to bitterness, “ _and_ yourself, you need to go the fuck to sleep.”

And before he knows what’s happening, John’s taken his cup from him – he was going to _finish_ that – and gripped him by the elbow in order to lead him over to the chaise lounge by the wall. Flint could dislodge the grip with ease, but not without sending John reeling. The bastard knows this, probably calculated the likelihood of Flint’s willingness to unbalance him and acted accordingly.

He glares at him and receives a guileless look in return.

John is far too solid and warm pressed all along his side. It makes Flint want to sway into that warmth – and here his military brain conjures up a sequence of events, soft around the edges because perhaps he does need sleep: if he sways as he wishes, he places too much weight over John’s missing left. They lurch and stumble; in order to prevent an awkward crash to the ground, Flint would have to turn his back to the lounge and let himself fall, John coming along for the ride down.

John removes his grip from his arm in order to push him down, alone. “I’d very much like to go to sleep as well, you know.”

It dashes Flint’s thoughts. He lets himself fall further back into the lounge, head turning into the scraped velvet, away from John.

“I have no Penelope,” he says, or tries to. It may be his own disoriented perception, but he thinks he might have said _am_ instead of _have._

John makes a noise. He doesn’t sound amused at the mistake. He is silent a moment, hand stills pressed flat against his chest. Finally, he lowers himself to the footrest next to the lounge, hands clasping over his crutch.

“No, I should think not,” he says after a moment. “You’re testing my memory – it’s been a long time since I was able to read the classics. But if you are anyone, surely it is Achilles.”

“Because he lost his love.” James has a vivid flash of memory of being a new midshipman, barely a day past twelve and dreadfully lonely. Huddling in a chilly, damp hammock, knobbly knees pressed up to his too-thin chest, ignoring the twin pangs of hunger and growing muscles in favor of the tight pain in his throat as he read under a rocking lantern, for the very first time, about Achilles and his Patroclus.

“Because he won the day.” John’s tone is an almost-gentle correction, distant above him like thunder in the dark, signaling a presence that has been and gone. “And no one ever forgot it.”

And that’s not quite right – there’s an important detail to the story that John has skipped, either through forgetfulness or convenience – but Flint is tired and, anyway, the thought is a pleasant one, borne as it was on his friend’s voice.

 _Alright_ , he thinks to whatever god may be listening. _Call forth the dawn. I will be ready._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original tumblr post [here](https://bal-lantine.tumblr.com/post/157193839285/to-the-deathless-gods-who-rule-the-vaulting-skies)


	4. a conversation we should have had

Before he met Flint and the rest of them, Silver never considered himself an angry man. Didn’t think he was capable of it, even. He’d thought there was freedom to that — that _distance_. When he was turned away from shelter and sustenance, when others tried to take from him, be it his paltry purse or even his life — he understood it.

That is what the world is. One does what one must, it’s not personal (it’s never personal). He could and did routinely curse his own luck, but he was never truly angry.

Rage comes when the world fails to meet your expectations, and John never had any of those. Not until he met James fucking Flint. And rage is the true tropical fever of the West Indies, infecting everyone who reaches the shores of Nassau.

Rage is what makes his limbs tremble now, as he limps out of the dark uneven tunnel beneath the fort.

He is no longer that man who could shrug off setbacks and slights. Pirates take everything personally, it’s one of the first things he learned about them. And this? Flint not even looking at him as he talks to Eleanor Guthrie, as he steps forward through that gate. It’s more personal than he can bear.

Billy had said, desperation cracking his voice, that the two of them had survived Flint. But Silver feels slain.

What the _fuck_ was he thinking?

Freeing Nassau, setting up a new pirate republic, Long John Silver — these are stories to tell other men. He never forgets their true provenance: a carefully constructed relationship between he and Flint, built through bloodshed and soul-scalding honesty, the likes of which he’s never known.

Madi tells him he doesn’t need Flint and he has been unable to articulate a proper response — a rare enough occurrence, and one she seems strangely gifted at eliciting, especially when discussing the captain. Perhaps he might have been able to furnish one if he’d said it to Flint first. So many conversations they’ve shared over the weeks, and somehow he’d never managed any that approached the truth:

_You are one of those irreplaceable things._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original tumblr post [here](https://bal-lantine.tumblr.com/post/157620610135/a-conversation-we-should-have-had)


	5. so it goes

**I. John exchanges the cache for Madi**

“Still not talking to you, then.”

Dooley props himself up against the wall next to John, hocks up a mouthful of tobacco juice and launches it against the planks beneath their feet. He looks across the deck to where Madi and Flint are standing and then at John, who hasn’t looked away from their jointly-turned backs for the past two hours of sailing.

John’s not about to confide in Dooley of all people, but he can feel the words pressing up against the back of his teeth. _They didn’t even get along before all this._

(Well, that’s not strictly true. While Madi did not trust Flint, Flint had liked her fine. Though he always looked mystified and not a little put out whenever John would leave to go to her.)

It’s strange to look back on that time and realize it might have been the happiest he’ll ever be in his life. He’d woken each day knowing he’d spend it with people he cared for, people who saw him and knew him. He’d been drunk with the possibility of the future, knowing Madi and Flint would be at his side through it all.

Thing about being drunk, though? The hangover always comes.

“She’s alive,” John says, and feels the pronouncement echoes down into the depths of his heart: _she’s alive, she’s_ alive _._ “And we didn’t risk the crew on a suicidal run into Nassau town. All in all, I would claim this one as a victory.”

Because _that’s_ how he feels right now, with the two people he cares most for in the world refusing to so much as look at him: victorious.

Dooley doesn’t look impressed. Like all the Walrus crew who stayed on the maroon island, he never learned to fear Long John Silver to the extent the men who were party to Billy’s resistance did. John greets the attitude with a mixture of irritation and relief.

“Don’t think many will agree with you on that,” Dooley says finally. “Hard to, what with us being back broke on the maroon island and Nassau razed to the ground.”

“The cache will be back in our possession as soon as we retake Nassau. And even if it’s not – if Rogers returns it to the Spanish before we get that chance – we’re _pirates_.” He can’t believe the words that are coming out of his mouth, but it’s hardly the first time he’s surprised himself in the past year. “We’ll steal more money when the need arises.”

Dooley doesn’t look too impressed with that either.  
  


**II. They rescue Madi but the ship is sunk**

James knows John is still furious with him – angry that his response to the news of Madi’s miraculous survival did not include the wholesale retreat of his strategic faculties.

But John lets his emotions sometimes overrule his own ability to make hard decisions. It’s hardly the first time he has witnessed it; his rage over the reality of rationing in the doldrums comes to mind. And after a few months of keeping intimate company with the man, James finds he can cast his mind back and find plenty more examples, times where John looked at the lay of the land and picked the most treacherous path. A path that led to James, time and again.

He doesn’t blame him for such foolish decisions. John was never a military man. He was barely even a pirate. He does, however, blame him for _this_.

“The cache,” he hears Madi say – voice measured, because she communicates her anger in less public ways, a politic attribute James has come to respect, if not necessarily emulate. “The promised treasury that is the uniting beacon to what I’ve just been told are several dozen factions scattered throughout the islands – it was on that ship?”

The ship she is referring to is, of course, burning in the bay. Steadily sinking into the depths, its contents lost to the sea.

John shifts on his crutch but does not offer comment or apology.

James knows he should be angry as well, but he cannot summon the emotion. As previously mentioned, his capacity for logic is damnably unassailable. It would be senseless to be angry at John for acting according to his character as James has come to understand it.

(Senseless to be angry. But _hurt_ it another matter – hurt is an opportunistic disease and requires no logic in order to fester.)

“This will be difficult to explain when we return,” James says, an implicit agreement with Madi and somewhat petty _fuck you_ to John.

John cocks his head, lips thinning, but still does not look at either of them.

James glances at Madi and finds, with a surprising glint of pleasure, that she is glancing right back at him.

“A short while ago, both of you were willing to give the cache up as an inconsequential loss,” John says. He’d sound bitter if the relief from Madi’s recovery wasn’t still lightening his tone and expression. “But now you’re angry I’ve let it go in what was supposed to be an exchange for Madi’s life?”

James and Madi look away from each other in order to glare at him and says in complete agreement:

“ _Yes_.”  
  


**III. They rescue Madi but Jack intercepts them**

“Look,” Jack says, “this is, I’ll grant, slightly awkward.”

They are all standing aboard Flint’s ship – and it is still _Flint’s_ ship, no matter that Silver and the maroon woman seem to accord as much deference as he upon the deck.

“ _Awkward_ ,” Silver says, voice biting. He is a little more frayed than Jack remembers from their last rendezvous, but he supposes that’s what war against civilization will do to a man. “Last we saw you, you were disappearing over the horizon with a ship and crew that had been pledged to our war effort. Now here you are, proclaiming your intent to kill Captain Flint as if it were no more than a trifling raise in a card game.”

Jack pulls back from the impulse to dispute that charge. He knows better than to try to explain the intricate reasoning behind his actions. He holds no enmity towards any of them, but as always, the only person who doesn’t seem personally offended by all this is Flint himself.

Pity he’s the one Jack is supposed to kill.

“Your name holds sway among the pirates and maroons,” Jack says to Silver. “But it has not yet been poisoned in Philadelphia. Stand aside and we can remake Nassau into everything we had once hoped.”

They all stand still then, waiting for someone to make the next move. Flint, whose expression hasn’t so much as flinched since Jack first arrived and announced his intentions, is watching Silver. Jack watches him too, certain that he is the figure key to this moment of changing alliances and fortunes.

But it is Madi, the maroon princess, who makes the decision. She lifts her arm and crooks a few fingers, and suddenly Jack is surrounded by her men, every one of them bristling towards violence.

Jack surveys them all and nods. He says, “Now is perhaps a good time to draw your attention to my open gun ports.”

“Will your men fire while you are still aboard?” Madi wonders aloud, in that tone only those raised in power seem to possess – every question rhetorical until demanded otherwise, the assumption being they already have every answer. “I was never given the impression that you were a self-sacrificing man, Captain Rackham.”

“This is all there is,” Jack says to her, and bleakness creeps into his tone against his wishes. “I have one path forward for Anne and I. I don’t return with news of Flint’s demise, that path disappears and we are left as destitute as when we started.”

Silver shifts forward, and everyone tenses. He is looking at Jack with a thoughtful crease in his forehead.

“And what if you were able to return with your cache? Disappear back into civilization as you had originally intended before Rogers arrested you in Nassau?”

Now Flint and Madi and everyone on the deck are staring at him. Silver withstands the scrutiny with nary a drop of shame.

“Nice coat, by the way,” he adds to Jack.  
  


**IV. John exchanges the cache for Madi, but it does not go as planned (because Flint)**

“You really should not have done this,” Flint is saying when she is brought out of the dungeons. “Or if you were so determined to follow this path, you should have at least told me.”

“So you could stop me?” John says to him bitterly. Then his eyes alight on her and his expression transforms.

She wants nothing more than to run to him, hold him tight and let them both feel the life still yet in each other’s bodies. But the Rogers man is present. She will not bend to show him any emotion other than steely resolve.

When John’s eyes drop and take in the manacles restraining her arms and legs, she has to allow there are other reasons she cannot run. She has been trying not to think about them, or about her mother and father and how they had felt similar bindings long ago, how they had worked hard so that she never had to.

She understands now, the horror that hid them deep in the jungle and away from the world. She understands it, but she won’t return to hiding. She’ll use this new knowledge the way her parents taught her, to forge a stronger bond with every woman and man she liberates from a slave camp.

“Get those fucking chains off of her,” John says harshly to Rogers.

Rogers isn’t moved by the display of anger. Just quirks his eyebrows and says, “First, the cache.”

As her men bring the chest forward, Flint shifts on his feet, drawing Madi’s eye. She is still watching him when it is thrown open and everyone else looks down at its contents. His expression is difficult as it settles on John.

After a moment, she realigns her gaze and joins them in studying the pile of worthless rocks that were supposed to be Nassau’s new treasury.

“I asked for your trust,” Flint says. “But I may have understated the exact parameters that would be required.”

All eyes are on the pair of men – John is staring at Flint, expression growing darker by the second – so Madi takes advantage of the moment and throws her chains around Rogers’s neck, hauling him down against her. He struggles, but she has the metal pressed tight against his carotid artery with a disabling pressure.

 _Let’s see you die fighting_ , she thinks, and pulls harder as furious shouts and struggles break out throughout the men in the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original tumblr post [here](https://bal-lantine.tumblr.com/post/158361543860/so-it-goes)


End file.
